Deep Links

Last Modified January 24, 2018|
Originally Posted August 13, 2014

There are many instances that the default offer URL or even additional offer URLs will not be where the affiliate wants to send traffic to. Especially with e-commerce sites, affiliates will often want to send traffic to specific product or category pages.

HasOffers has a setting in the offer that lets the affiliate specify what URL the traffic will be redirected to by specifying that URL in the tracking link using the url parameter.

Enabling Deep Links

To enable deep links on an offer, first go to the offer’s page. In the Tracking panel, click Edit. Set the Deep Links setting to “Enabled” and click Save.

Back on the offer page, you will now see a similarly named setting in the Generate Tracking panel:

When you check the box, a field will appear that you can put in the custom URL you want that tracking to redirect to. In an example, let’s put this URL in the field:

http://example.com

When you update the tracking link by clicking Update, the final tracking link will look like this:

As you can see, the custom URL was appended to the end of the tracking link in an encoded format (done automatically when put into the deep link field.) The url parameter is used to tell the ad server what URL to redirect to on click. If the deep link setting is enabled for the offer, you can put any URL into that url parameter, it does not have to be entered each time using the field in the generate tracking section:

http://demo.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1&url=URL_HERE

Ideally the URL is encoded, or used URL safe characters to not trip up the original tracking link. If you are adding URLs manually to tracking links, consider using an encoding tool like this one to encode your custom deep links.

There’s no reporting tool that shows if deep links are being used. To do this, the affiliate would have to append affiliate sub ID values to signify that they used deep links. If you are adding a tracking link into a creative and the click action isn’t working as expected, the click URL may need to be URL encoded.

Deep Links for Postback Tracking Offers

If the offer is set to track using server postbacks, one obstacle encountered is passing the transaction ID to the custom URL specified on click. If you are manually adding deep links to your affiliate tracking URLs, then this will encounter a problem as the transaction ID won’t be passed to the custom URL unless you remember to add the {transaction_id} macro to the deep link so the ad server and append the actual value on redirect.

The generate tracking tool checks what parameter the {transaction_id} tool is passed into on the default offer URL and assumes that the custom deep link will accept that same parameter, and appends the parameter along with the {transaction_id} macro in the custom deep link. This is only done when the deep link is pasted into the field in the generate tracking section.

For example, let’s say this is the default offer URL set for the offer:

http://www.example.com?trans={transaction_id}

Because the offer is set to the server postback w/ Transaction ID attribution method, the generate tracking tool determines that the same trans={transaction_id} value needs to be passed to the new URL. So when the original URL is entered into the deep link field:

http://example.com

The final tracking link will append the deep link along with the encoded parameter at the end:

Passing Macros Through Deep Links

In the example above, you can see that the transaction ID macro can be added to a custom deep link and the value will be passed through to the URL successfully. This same setup can be applied for all optional macros that can be passed through any default offer URL.